If your company has not yet moved towards platformization, it can still be a great leap forward. You can still speed up software delivery by addressing the company's change management process. In this chapter, we will study the change management model we learned within the company. We will show you what is effective and what is ineffective, and how to use DevOps principles to transform change management into an effective and enabling process.
In the past ten years, we have seen the practice of DevOps subvert the way the software release team works. The following are the most significant changes.
"The problem itself will not change, because the change is happening all the time; the problem is that it cannot be dealt with when the change comes." Kent Beck "Analyzing Extreme Programming: Embracing Change"
Even if we see the delivery team successfully transform their thinking and practices, it is still much more difficult to change the entrenched structures and processes in a large organization. Change management is one of the most difficult processes to change.
Moving to a new way of doing things requires leadership support, organizational discipline, and a lot of cooperation and collaboration across all levels of the organization. However, the large legacy environments that have developed in most large organizations are not easy to split and redesign. They are usually maintained by many different teams, each of which owns a part of the technology stack. A team that understands the work usually lacks the authority to approve the changes it proposes; on the contrary, change approval is often assigned to committees that are divorced from the actual work and don't know enough about it.
All these levels exist because the large legacy environment is the main business of the organization. Therefore, any change will make people feel risky, and there are a lot of processes and bureaucracy, making people feel that they are protecting the safety of the enterprise.
Unfortunately, all these processes hinder the development of the organization. They simply cannot release software quickly—whether for external or internal customers—to meet business needs. At the same time, competitors that make their change management more effective can release quickly and repeatedly, putting them ahead.
DevOps evolution and change management effectiveness
We want to see if the effectiveness of change management is related to the development of DevOps. In order to measure the effectiveness of change management, we observe from the following three dimensions:
Implementation success rate. We observed the change failure rate and deployment frequency. Ideally, companies should be able to change more frequently, recover quickly from failures, and learn from them.
Efficiency level. We want to know how efficient the change is. The management process is based on the following:
• Mandatory waiting period of less than two weeks
• Only one approval for changes
• The changes are implemented correctly and do not need to be undone
• Approved by someone with the appropriate skills to make a correct assessment
• Little time required to record changes
Performance sentiment. As a proxy for the objective assessment of each respondent’s organization, we developed this indicator. We asked respondents whether their company’s change management procedures:
•reduce risk
• Reduce downtime related to service incidents
• Provide information useful to the organization
•Ensure that knowledge and information are shared with appropriate stakeholders
• Accelerate the speed of changes in business requirements
• Provide an appropriate level of review and approval based on the assessed risk level of the change
These three dimensions—implementation success rate, efficiency level, and performance sentiment—constitute a measure of the effectiveness of our change management.
We found that as organizations develop their DevOps practices, the effectiveness of change management has increased. Although the difference is not very big, the statistical performance is significant.
Change management methods
To investigate change management, we asked the interviewees about some of their different practices in the workplace. These can be divided into two parts: the change approval process and the degree of automation of the change. Can be divided into four groups:
Operation and maintenance are mature. High level of process and automation.
Engineering driven. Attaches great importance to automation.
Centered on governance. Attaches great importance to manual approval, not to automation.
Temporary. Not paying attention to process and automation.
What drives the effectiveness of change management?
When looking at the effectiveness of change management as a whole, you will find that engineering-driven companies have the highest level of change management effectiveness, temporary companies are ranked second due to lack of processes, and the remaining two groups rely heavily on orthodox approval , Does not score high on effectiveness.
Our data reveals something about the effectiveness and efficiency of impact change management:
Orthodox approval will reduce efficiency;
Automation makes the team confident in change management;
Granting permissions will bring greater efficiency.